If you're looking at fasting as the only change that you're going to do, I'm sorry that you're probably not really going to see the longer-term benefits that you're seeking.

So I encourage you, as you are looking at this powerful tool with some magical qualities, that you also think about what other lifestyle factors do I need to weave together with this fasting to really support it so that it can do its magic, rather than relying on it to kind of save you from all of those other lifestyle things that are harming you.

[music] Welcome back to another episode of The Fasting Method podcast.

This is Coach Terri Lance, and this is a Turbo Talk where I'm going to share with you three mindset realities that I think might help many of us fare better in this journey that we're in.

The first one is the idea that this journey is actually a self-care journey.

So often I hear people struggling in how to navigate losing weight, reversing their health concerns, and all of the goals that they come to us with because they're used to facing everything as a task that must be accomplished, a goal that they have to set, and oftentimes ways that they need to make themselves perform, discipline themselves, make it happen, achieve more, all of those words.

And what I find is that the more people are focusing on all of those, the more they're getting away from the reality that this journey is a self-care journey.

The more you take care of yourself, the more your body can do what it's meant to do.

The more you take care of your emotional needs, the better you will do.

The more you take care of your physical needs, the better you will do.

The more you focus on good nutritional care for yourself, the better this journey will go.

The more you address your needs while you're fasting, the better your fast will go.

Unfortunately, so many of us are not great at self-care.

We have some notions of what self-care looks like, but, if you really dig down, oftentimes the methods of self-care that we're really focused on are not actually caring for ourselves, they're kind of Band-Aid approaches to feeling better in the moment.

So if I were to ask you, what do you do for self-care?

And you reply to me that you take yourself to your favorite coffee shop and you get a really nice treat and a nice coffee drink, flavor of the month, whatever it might be, this isn't actually self-care.

This is self-indulgence, to try to kind of bribe yourself into feeling better momentarily, briefly, and then going right back to the reality that things are hard.

You're busy.

You've got relationships, and work, and other stressors and things that make life more complicated than just feeling good all the time.

Or if you tell me that your self-care is getting together with your friends and eating indulgently whatever you want, drinking as much as you want, and acting however you want, again, I'm going to have to differ with you.

I don't know that that's actually self-care.

Yes, it might be fun and, yes, it might feel good (again, for a short time), but most of us recognize (hopefully, at whatever stage in life you are currently occupying) that these strategies actually leave us less able to handle the stressors in life.

They leave us with a hangover.

They leave us feeling bloated and tired.

They leave us with brain fog.

They leave us not remembering what happened last night.

These aren't actually ways that help us tackle the things in our lives that are complicated, get through them, feel good in our skin.

So if you take a moment to really focus on what I've shared (that this journey is actually a journey of self-care), I invite you to look at how is it that you're taking care of yourself?

What are the things you do each day that go into this category of self-care?

Do you get up at the last moment and throw down two cups of coffee as quickly as you can so that you can get where you need to be, feeling discombobulated and rushed?

Is that self-care?

Do you find that you often are running short on time and effort, so, when it comes time to have a meal, you have to quickly pull something together, oftentimes from an app, or, if you work in an office, in the cafeteria or that section of work that is filled with all kinds of problematic foods?

Is that self-care, or would self-care mean you took the time to prepare something, or plan something that fits your eating approach, that gives you the proper nutrition that you need, that doesn't overtax your body, that doesn't overtax your insulin and other responses in your body and other hormones?

Would you answer that you take care of yourself by going out to restaurants and sparing yourself from having to cook?

Does this actually lead to feeling well?

Does it provide you the nutrition you need without all of the compounding factors that you don't need?

Does it help your wallet?

Is it actually self-care or is it a coping mechanism for just navigating being too busy and having too many things on your plate all at once?

Sleep.

If I were to ask you about your self-care when it comes to sleep.

Does it involve drinking caffeine all day and then trying to take something at night to slow your brain down?

Or does self-care related to sleep mean really looking at sleep hygiene and making sure that your environment is appropriate for you?

Making sure that you have all that you need to set yourself up for a good night's sleep?

Maybe doing some meditation or some other strategies?

Does it mean planning your day and your evening so that you have time to wind down and be in a relaxed state at an appropriate bedtime so that sleep works well for you?

These are some questions I encourage you to think about, as far as are you actually taking care of yourself or are you trying to put kind of Band-Aids on places where you, your mind, and your body need more care, but you don't know where to get it, you don't know how to provide it for yourself, or you don't feel like you have the luxury to achieve those things.

Remember that this journey is a journey of self-care.

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[music] The second mindset reality that I want to focus on is something that I hear often in Community meetings at TFM.

I hear this from clients and I see this in the Facebook group as well.

Many people come to learn about fasting, and they embrace it as a very powerful, almost magical tool.

And I think for many of us, it does feel very powerful and almost magical, in that it helps us to achieve things that were not actually achievable in the past, or at least not in a sustainable way.

The problem is that, oftentimes, people have learned about fasting in isolation.

It's almost like a weight-loss medication.

Back in the day, it was certain pill combinations that people would take to lose weight.

Currently, we hear a lot of talk about people taking weight-loss medications by injection.

The reality is those things don't work in isolation, or at least not in a healthy way.

If you are taking a weight-loss medication, you probably already know that it also takes other changes.

It takes more movement, more focusing on building lean mass and protecting your muscle.

It takes being active.

It takes making good choices about your nutrition because those medications on their own can't fix it.

And folks, neither can fasting.

Fasting is a powerful, powerful tool, but if we are not willing to look at the other areas in our lives that kind of intertwine with fasting, we're putting too much pressure on this powerful tool and expecting it to be the magical fix.

And it can't do that.

I've watched some people who are unwilling to look at what they eat and when they eat, don't really care what impact that has on insulin, don't really care what impact that has on their liver, on their brain, on their other organs and other systems.

They're just going for the food that tastes good, or is provided at work, or by others without really looking at what does it do for them and for their health and longevity.

Then they jump into a fast, which is definitely going to be harder to do when our food is off track and not supportive of our goals, but what I see is that sometimes they do end up losing some weight initially, but they don't necessarily get the health benefits of fasting.

They don't see their blood-sugar markers really improving.

They don't see the fatty liver being addressed.

They don't see a greater sense of clarity of mind in decision making; they have a lot of brain fog.

And sometimes, unfortunately, when people are struggling with this, the way that they make sense of it is that maybe fasting isn't so good after all.

Maybe this is another kind of myth I've heard, and it just doesn't really ring true.

I think what they're really highlighting is that fasting alone cannot save us from habits and choices that cause health problems, that cause the high insulin, that cause fatty liver.

Certainly, it can help reverse these things if we're also

pairing it with the other behaviors: a lot of healthy movement for the body utilizing our big muscles and using our glucose in our bodies, and helping our pancreas to have good insulin balance and have good insulin sensitivity in our body.

In these ways, fasting gets to shine, it gets to do its somewhat magical work, and it can feel surprising how much of a game changer can be.

But if you're looking at fasting as the only change that you're going to do, I'm sorry that you're probably not really going to see the longer-term benefits that you're seeking.

So I encourage you, as you are looking at this powerful tool with some magical qualities, that you also think about what other lifestyle factors do I need to weave together with this fasting to really support it so that it can do its magic, rather than relying on it to kind of save you from all of those other lifestyle things that are harming you.

The third mindset reality that I want to talk about is that, for most of us, going from the last one that I just discussed, although learning how to fast and doing it so that the power of fasting can work its magic on our body.

We also have to be looking at the underlying behaviors and habits that initially built up our insulin resistance, our body's difficulty with releasing weight or managing weight well, our challenge of losing body fat, our maybe limits and mobility, our joint pain, all of these health concerns, maybe our glucose concerns, some fatty liver concerns.

And underneath all of that really lies our relationship with food.

And some of you know that I talk often about, again, not just leaning on fasting, but really looking at what are we doing in our relationship with food.

How can we address this as a primary change to the long-term nature of what we're going to do for our health and our weight management, or weight loss?

Some people say, "Well, Terry, I'd rather just do a three-day fast , three or four times a month, or a five-day fast.

I'll just do this big fasting effort and this will take care of everything." But the reality is fasting is not whatever caused us to get to the complex places that we are in our health and our weight, that it's actually more (for most of us) many years of a problematic relationship with food.

The foods that we have been taught to use as coping mechanisms, as our emotional management system, as our form of entertainment, our form of social connection with others.

This relationship really is what underlies what leads to our insulin resistance, our weight gain, and our difficulty losing weight.

So what's the solution?

Besides learning how to fast and changing our relationship with food, how can we do this?

Now, obviously this is something I focus on a lot at TFM and here in our podcast.

I think one of the key features that many of us bypass and forget to look at is why is it that we're moving toward a problematic interaction with food?

Why has it become our go-to best friend, our confidant, our self-soothing strategy?

And I think if we really dig down, some of us will recognize it's because we haven't created a lot of space in our lives for joy, for satisfaction, or contentment.

We have focused so much on survival.

We have focused a lot on achieving, being more, earning more, doing more.

We haven't really given ourselves that space to fill our lives with things that are meaningful, things that bring us a calm and a sense of fulfillment.

And therefore, where do we turn for that fulfillment?

It's so easy to turn to a problematic food, to briefly feel fulfilled, as a way of substituting for the lack of fulfillment that we have learned to allow for ourselves with having hobbies that are enriching, having relationships that fill us with joy and connection, having time to rest, having time to reset and nourish ourselves and our needs, our curiosity, our intellect, our creativity.

So what I really want to invite you to consider is, is it possible for me to struggle less in this relationship with food, this building in of my fasting muscle and figuring out my fasting plan if I also take time to really look at where in my life can I create space for joy, for satisfaction, and contentment?

Fulfillment in relationships, in my work, in my hobbies, in creativity, in nature?

What things can bring me that positive feeling so that I am less likely to need to rely on food to be that kind of stop-gap filler when I'm bored, when I'm exhausted, when I'm down, when I'm scared?

What if I worked on fulfilling my needs with something other than turning to food.

So these three mindset realities are certainly ones that I focus on a lot at TFM.

I hear so many of our members and our clients working on these areas of mindset improvement and struggling with them.

So again, what I invite you to do is spend time kind of poring over each of these.

See how they fit for you, see how they are working for you or not working for you, and what can you do to change them?

How can you create more focus on self-care rather than dieting, punishing yourself, making your body behave?

How can you focus on self-care?

How can you look at fasting as a powerful tool with some magical qualities that needs a well-rounded approach.

It can not carry you alone.

It needs you to focus on what nutritional inputs you put into your body, what other self-care things you provide as far as movement, relaxation, rest, sleep, nourishment.

And lastly, are there other areas in your life that if you spent more time developing and supporting positively, could you kind of extricate yourself from a problematic relationship with food because your life feels more fulfilling?

You have more joy.

You laugh more.

You find meaning in things in your life, not turning to food to fill these needs.

I appreciate you listening in to my Turbo Talk.

I know these are kind of complicated or maybe heavy topics to really allow yourself to think about, but I think, for many of us, we find in this process, if we truly want to transform our lives versus just lose some weight or fix some health concerns, if we want to truly transform, these three mindset realities are really the basis of so much of that work.

So we will be back next week with another episode of The Fasting Method podcast, and look forward to connecting with you then.

[music]